"The Sony UX1XN is quite possibly one of the smallest laptops ever. Think of the smallest laptop you've ever seen, and this will be smaller. Probably. Everything about it is dinky - it's barely bigger than a thick-ish paperback book, yet it packs a full Vista-touting PC inside its diddy dimensions."

Or an OQO whose most expensive model is $1850 USD. I'm looking forward to having one of these ultra-smalls in the next couple of years even if their battery life is crap. But, no, I wouldn't pay Ģ2000 for it.

AFAIK, the battery life is bad because of the network stack not allowing the wireless card go to sleep or something like that. Not super fetch and not idle indexing. The indexing if I understand the technology correctly only indexes new things once the preliminary indexing is over.....it would be foolish to reindex the whole hard drive. Isnt Google Desktop search something like that as well? It just crawls ocassionaly and doesnt it automatically index the particular files everytime you create/modify them? I would think they meaning Microsoft and Google would have thought of that...

Vista takes something like 15GB of that tiny 32gb flash drive just for the install. And the recovery partition takes 6.5GB... That's just crazy

That's one of the downsides of Vista. It doesn't scale well with different kinds of devices. It tends to be a big pig in little clothes! Linux, et al., does a better job of scaling up and down. Almost any distro I can think of would fit in this device and only use a few gig after the install. In addition, the 1GB of ram would be more than enough, while you are pushing the limits with Vista and 1GB.

"Too bad 2K is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we'll just have to live with XP shoved down our throats now.

Too bad 9x is largely considered as obsolete by hardware manufacturers and MS. So unfortunately we'll just have to live with 2K shoved down our throats now."

Ok, I got your point. And yes, MS stuff have always been shoved down our throats...

But this time it's worse than before, though. We all know that 2k was a huge step up from 9x in many ways. And even if XP wasn't that big of an upgrade, it didn't make things worse either. But Vista is whole different animal altogether - its disadvantages (e.g. drm/wga/activation/bloat) far outweight its possible advantages (IMHO).

But there may be a positive side to this too: hopefully it will make more people and businesses to reconsider whether it makes sense to stay in the MS's boat anymore.

That said, I absolutely agree, but I've already made the decision to not purchase Vista. If that means I am unable to get a laptop with Linux preinstalled or empty (at an acceptable price point) then I'll either move on to the MacBooks or do without. I may love my laptop, but I'm not willing to pay the Microsoft tax. This doesn't really apply to my desktop machines, since I've always either built my own or bought one without an OS and threw on one of my unused copies at home.

--bornagainpenguin (who wishes there were non-X86, non-windows laptops with more than five hour battery life somewhere)

What are you talking about. Linux is the best OS in this planet. Any device should use Linux (from Embed to desktop to server). It's a huge mistake that Sony take a non-linux OS as their default OS. Damn it.

It can run all your windows (or linux if you're that way inclinde) software on something much smaller and easier to carry around than a laptop. No PDA can do that. If it didn't cost stupid amounts of money and had slightly better battery life I'd buy one in a heartbeat just to put mathematica and matlab on and use as an uber-calculator.

Well, it's just my taste: but I find that so awful, the keyboard looks toyish, the shape just make it look like a startreck device. Besides the screen on the upperside will make it prone to scratches. And the docking station is even uglier.

I wouldn't even be proud to carry it around or show it off to my friends!

Since we're discussing a world of free software, I fail to see why it makes a difference if the device comes pre-loaded with Linux or not. AFAIK, the GMA950 has X.org support. If you want one but would rather it run Linux, then you can always buy the device, and install Linux on it.

That's the beauty of free software. You are not tied to what the manufacturer gives you.

Now granted there's always the 'Windows Tax' but a quick Google search will show that getting a refund for your unused windows is not unheard of.

I like the idea of small ultraportable devices, but the OS is all wrong. I've played around with the previous XP models, and it just wasn't comfortable to use on such a small device(mostly due to the screen).

Indeed. Add the Psion netBook and netBook Pro to your list--they pack some of the best keyboards out there. The answer to what happened to those devices, though, is that they are being replaced with ultra-portable laptops these days.

But calling this device a "laptop" really is misleading, considering it doesn't have a proper keyboard. It's a
"UMPC"--Unsuitable for Most People's Conditions.